Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016
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Guyer, Sara. Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism. Fordham University Press, 2015. 123pp, ISBN: 978-0-8232-6557-2, Paperback, $26
Reviewed by
Buddhist Chaplain, Exeter University
At the outset I ought to mention that I am not an expert in ‘biopoetics’, ‘biopolitics’ or Romanticism. I write this review as a lay person interested in the English poet, John Clare, Romanticism and human consciousness. My academic expertise lies in the fields of art practice, philosophy, Buddhism, poetry and poetics. My views should be read with this background in mind.
Guyer’s book appears to be addressed to an audience of specialists, however, as a university publication this is not surprising. Certain key terms are accepted as givens, for instance: biopower, biopolitics and even biopoetics. No clear definitions of these terms are offered, this is regrettable as understanding them is very necessary if Guyer’s subtle and nuanced argument is to be fully comprehended.
The reader will note that this is a reading with Clare, not a reading of Clare. Alongside her other concerns Guyer considers her aims to include re-establishing close reading as a useful and valid tool with which to examine poetry and its relationship to life – in this case John Clare’s poetry in the context of theories of politics, power, identity and displacement. In Chapter 4, Guyer makes an interesting and effective case for close reading and aesthetics as both a complement to, and a critique of, much contemporary theoretical writings about poetry – particularly quantitative readings of Romanticism and John Clare. She is interested in the way “life inevitably interrupts power” and in the way Clare experiences a “convergence of aesthetics and politics.” (4)
Guyer suggests that British and French poets writing in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries had a “preoccupation with life.” (1-2) Literature of this period takes often takes as a theme the effects of power over life, but also takes life itself as a primary concern. She gives as an obvious example Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein, (1818) which Guyer states “could be read as a vivid example of the analogy between what Foucault calls biopower and literary power – or literature as a form of biopower.” (2) Foucault and Paul de Man are significant reference points for Guyer, particularly the former’s, Society Must Be Defended lectures and The History of Sexuality, and the latter’s essays on autobiography and Shelley Disfigured. Guyer suggests that the theories articulated by Foucault and de Man are both useful and yet limited and constrictive.
There are interesting chapters on Clare’s grave and his wishes for it, and on debates surrounding the editing of Clare’s poetry, from his first contemporary editor, John Taylor to more recent examples, Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield, and Jonathan Bate. She explores the literary and ideological currents at work under the surface of the common aim of many recent editors to “unedit” Clare’s writings, that is, to undo the ‘corrections’, grammatical insertions and textual changes made by earlier editors, in order to re-establish an authoritative text that is closer to Clare’s own manuscripts. She also points out how difficult this task is and how impossible it is to know what would count as a text that “does justice” to Clare or, as she puts it, to “remedy the harm done to him through years of betrayed allegiances, indifferent audiences, and unrealized success.” (56)
Following a chapter devoted to ideas of ‘self-identity’ (a term coined by Clare) in which she explores Clare’s own statements and theories developed by Giorgio Agamben and Joao Biehl, particularly the notion of the persona as a mask, Guyer goes on to discuss the “poetics of homelessness” (chap. 5). This is one of the most interesting sections of the book - developing ideas drawn from Clare’s sense of self-identity into his experience of displacement and dislocation – both geographical and psychological, his “internal displacement.” (79) Guyer writes: “When Clare’s readers talk about his homelessness, they tend to evoke two apparently distinct, and even irreconcilable, experiences: the Enclosure Act of 1809 [implemented in 1820, when first book of poetry was published] and Clare’s 1832 move from Helpston to Northborough.” (80) In Helpston, his birthplace, the enclosure act turned the ancient open field system into a closed one, divided and defined by fences and legal boundaries. As Guyer points out, rather than Clare having moved in Helpston, Helpston and its agricultural geography moved under his feet – such that he became, like many agricultural workers and their families, out of joint, out of step, disorientated and disenfranchised by the new order of boundaries, prohibitions and all the social consequences of these changes. They became exiles in their own village. This has obvious implications for Clare’s sense of identity or non-identity and Guyer takes this up as another thread of her argument.
Having just reviewed Helen Vendler’s collection of essays on poetry, The Ocean, The Bird, and the Scholar, it is interesting to note what radically different approaches to “close reading” Vendler and Guyer take. Vendler works outwards from the poem as artefact, as a verbal, syntactical structure, while Guyer seems always to work inwards, looking at the poetry through various theoretical lenses. At times, Guyer seems to use Clare’s poetry only insofar as it supports, exemplifies, or even illustrates, a theoretical position or point that she is keen to make. This, has the effect of making the poetry itself, Clare’s complex and significant writing, subordinate to, or even marginal, to what Guyer has to say. This gives the book itself an odd sense of displacement – a sense reinforced in a small way by the cover image which seems to have little or nothing to with Clare’s English Northamptonshire roots.
For this reader at least, Guyer’s short and tightly woven text, though intellectually stimulating, is somewhat disappointing. I feel I’ve not learnt a great deal about Clare’s writing, or about his particular place in the political, social or cultural landscape of his time. However, I have learnt much about aspects of theories with which I was not familiar and which Guyer articulates in a lively, thoughtful and, at times, provocative manner. For those working in Guyer’s field, Reading with John Clare, will no doubt be an informative and useful addition to the literature on their subject.